Saturday, October 24, 2020

Exile's Reach

I created a Human Rogue to test out Exile's Reach, the new starting experience.

Oddly enough, what it most reminded me of is TERA, and the starting island in that game. A very similar experience of doing small quests in a short linear story on an island that ends with a dungeon/boss fight.

I should note that I did Exile's Reach without addons or heirlooms, and with the basic stock UI. As a result, I didn't see any bugs. Pretty much everything worked smoothly for me, much as expect Blizzard intended.

I thought Exile's Reach was a good starting zone, introducing the basic elements nicely. The story was simple, but fun. There were lots of nice touches, especially introducing emotes like /wave and /dance. The dungeon at the end was pretty good. Some trash, a couple bosses, and a dragon.

I really liked the class-specific quest. For the rogue, it was about sneaking around an elite bear and then using poisons to kill an ogre. I kind of want to see the other class quests, but I'm not sure it's worth doing so many times over.

About the only criticism I have is that the first enemy should not have been murlocs. The point of murlocs is to instill fear and terror into new players. Attacking a single murloc should cause the entire camp to come chasing you. That is the true murloc experience.

6 comments:

  1. The funny thing is, the NPC actually warns you about not getting mobbed by murlocs and how they're no threat individually but hell in packs... and then they all come as single pulls with no social aggro.

    I also did Exile's Reach with no addons, heirlooms and the stock UI and I had a ton of bugs and glitches. In fact, I've done it twice and had them both times, although not always the same ones. I think a lot of it comes from going faster than the tutorial expects you to go or from making different chioces than it wants you to make, something a totally new layer wouldn't do but most experienced players would. For example, the game really hates it if you put an icon anywhere on your hotbar other than the exact slot indicated or if you heal yourself up without eating the food it's prompting you to use. I was still getting reminders for things like that it thought I hadn't done even after I'd left Exile's Reach. The only way to stop them was to switch the tips off altogether.

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    1. Hmm, I'm not sure why you're having such a hard time with these systems.

      Personally, when I do a tutorial, I don't do anything other than what the game tells me to do. I wait for the tutorial to finish before customizing things.

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  2. I find it ironic as TERA slips into, well, the slow walk of oblivion that it's intro zone lives on in WoW.

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    1. Well, I'm not sure if they were directly inspired. It may just be that if you set a tutorial on an island, you end up in the same place. Convergent design, as it were.

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  3. Hunters learn to tame, stable and change pets in their class-specific quests.

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    1. That sounds neat. I kind of want to take a hunter there now.

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